This episode features award-winning poet and author Maurice Manning, a native of Danville, Kentucky. Manning’s work has appeared in The Green Mountains Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Sonora Review, and The New Yorker. His collection entitled “Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions” was the 2001 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In the third segment of the interview Manning discusses his active efforts to put a stop to the coal industry’s destructive technique of “mountaintop removal” in his native Kentucky.

This is the third of four installments in our News Summit Special series “The Best of Andy Mahler” chosen from our deep archive of available podcasts. Mahler was a long-time host for Interchange who, in 2009, was presented with a WFHB Legacy Award for his service to the station. Mahler is active in Heartwood, a regional network founded in 1991 that protects forests and supports community activism in the Eastern United States through education, advocacy and citizen empowerment.

The final installment in our WFHB News Summit “Best of Andy Mahler” series. Bloomington resident Mick Harrison, one of the nation’s foremost environmental and public interest attorneys, talks with Mahler about the PCB contamination left behind by Westinghouse and their decades-long efforts to avoid responsibility for cleaning it up.

Tonight Interchange presents the second episode in our “Best of Andy Mahler” series.

Mahler’s guest in this program is Dwight Worker, long-time Bloomington resident, author, adventurer, and activist. Worker talks about his early years as an anti-war and civil rights activist at IU in the 60s, his escape from a Mexican prison in the 70s, his career in information systems in the 80s, his adventures as a drift-net sinker in the 90s, and his most recent career as a professor of information security at IU. This is one lively Interchange you won’t want to miss!

If you liked this interview and want to hear more with Andy Mahler just head to the archives! Here’s a shortcut: Andy Mahler on Interchange.

During the month of July our News Department programming will consist of a “Best Of ” series as we direct and attend our first ever WFHB News Summit. Our “Best of Interchange” highlights programs by host Andy Mahler, the recipient of the 2009 WFHB Legacy Award. In the first of these programs Andy interviews his mother, the artist Annemarie Mahler.

Annemarie (Ettinger) Mahler was born in Vienna, Austria in April of 1926. She eventually wound up in Bloomington but spent time in a Dutch orphanage, New York City, Berkeley, Dallas, and Madison, Wisconsin (and many other places) along the way. At Berkeley, she met and married a young biochemist named Henry Mahler, also born in Vienna. Incredibly, they had gone to the same elementary school yet had never met. They had three children, one of whom asks her about her life, love, her art, and anything else you might ask your own mother about on a live call-in radio program.

So tune in to Interchange to hear voices from the past as we prepare for our future. You’ll hear four great shows from our past. There are hundreds more to choose from. Get thee to the Interchange Archives and set to downloading!

Anyone with an interest in the current status of the News Department, the future of particular shows, or a desire to learn more radio skills is invited. You do not have to be a current volunteer in the News Department to attend any of the sessions. The first week of sessions, July 7th – July 11th will be geared toward information sessions on current procedures and practices, as well as program staff/listener meet and greets.

The Summit takes place July 7th through August 1st, Monday through Friday, 11am – 12pm. Sessions range from 45 minutes to 90 minutes and fall into one of three tracks: Big Ideas, Individual Programing, & Training. The same sessions are held at the same time each week, and each week takes on a different focus. Week one: Introductions, Week Two: Brainstorming, Week Three: Action Plan, Week Four: Implementation.

Host Doug Storm is joined by prominent blogger and Purdue PhD candidate Freddie DeBoer. DeBoer’s blog, Interfaces of the Word, is often linked to and excerpted by such national bloggers and columnists like Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic Monthly. His essays have appeared in New Inquiry, Salon, and Jacobin.

DeBoer is currently writing a dissertation, on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and its successor, the CLA+, developed by the Council for Aid to Education.

We look at issues in the politics and economics of our education system tonight with a fair amount of focus on Bill Gates whose Foundation has been said to have enacted an educational coup with the recent overwhelming acceptance of Common Core State Standards. And, due to the way most education policy is implemented in the states, there didn’t even need to be any public discussion or consent.

Big Philanthropy in Education is as much a subversion of the democratic process as the McCutcheon decision by the Supreme Court to uncap the number of candidates to which an individual can give money.

Host Doug Storm talks with Steve Sanders an associate professor in the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University. Sanders teaches in the areas of constitutional and public law while his current scholarship focuses on issues affecting same-sex couples and their families at the intersection of constitutional law, conflict of laws, federalism, and family law.

We spend the hour talking about recent Supreme Court decisions made by The Roberts Court. As the court is now decidedly split to favor money and power–routinely protecting institutional and financial power over the individual citizen–it seems to be working with an agenda in mind.

The Supreme Court of the United States is clearly a political and ideological institution and in our oligarchical moment of history, it is working in overdrive to support the designs of the 1% among us. Perhaps you’ll doubt my framing of the situation, but the record is clear as to the ideological bias of the court, and it’s moved further right since the appointments of Richard Nixon. In fact the justice often referred to as the “swing” vote on the Court, that one vote that clubs with either the 4 on the right or the 4 on the left, is the conservative Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee.

Tonight we try to think about the way Public Education is politicized and the way that the politics of education as a system of social management has made secondary considerations of learning as a path to human flourishing. Unless of course you consider workforce training the path to a realization of your human potential. We raise the issue of our public education system as fulfilling a kind of economic function as well. Where else will Pearson Education sell their wares? Where else will Bill Gates dump all his technology products? The host is Doug Storm.

Joining us for this conversation are:

Cathy Fuentes-Rowher, Chair of the Monroe County/South Central Indiana branch of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education–a grassroots group of people who believe that fully funded and equitable public schools are essential for a healthy democracy.

Cathy Diersing, the School Leader of The Bloomington Project School: a Charter school.

Steve “Roc” Boncheck, a founder and Director of the Harmony School here in Bloomington. Harmony is an Independent school.

Host Doug Storm is joined by three professors of literature at Indiana University, Jennifer Fleissner, Jonathan Elmer, and Christoph Irmscher, to examine Herman Melville’s great book, Moby Dick. Each of these readers and teachers share a favorite passage from the novel and try to say just what makes them respond with awe to this novel.

Deep calls unto deep. That is the whale song of Herman Melville who wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in response to the enthusiasm this friend and fellow traveller showed for his novel.

A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. (Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?] 1851)

For our program tonight, Voices on the Hill, Interchange producers Doug Storm and Trish Kerlé wend their way through Rose Hill Cemetery accompanied by Voces Novae, a local chamber choir under the artistic direction of Sue Swaney.

On May 17th Voces Novae gathered at the gates of Rose Hill Cemetery to begin what they termed a “musical walking tour” of the cemetery. The group, along with an audience which seemed to grow in number as they moved from stone to stone, walked to a designated gravesite and then Sue Swaney would speak a bit about the person buried there and then a song would be sung in tribute to that person (and “in tune” with that person’s biography or achievements).

But we’re going to plant the songs sung by Voces Novae like peonies around the gravestones.

This is the story of Rose Hill told by 3 people who have different relationships with the Cemetery. Together their stories will offer some new perspectives on a 200-year-old outdoor museum in Bloomington that, up until now, may have been all but invisible to citizens.

Also performing in the cemetery were Cindy Kallet and Grey Larsen, local folk musicians who released a much acclaimed album in 2007 titled Cross the Water.

We bring you this Interchange in two parts. In our first segment we’ll hear from the most powerful man in Bloomington, Jay Davidson, Sexton of the Rose Hill Cemetery and self-styled King of the Dead and in the second we’ll meet two keepers of the dead, Sally Gaskill and Lou Malcomb, both of whom work to keep what was lost found.

Host Doug Storm ends our three-part series on Bloomington author Ross Lockridge, Jr. and his bestselling novel of 1948 with an interview with Ernest Lockridge, the oldest child of Ross Lockridge, Jr.

In the program Ernest Lockridge discusses his answers to the mystery of his father’s suicide elaborated in his book Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father Ross Lockridge, Jr. laying emphasis on what he calls “the culture of pedophilia” of the 1940s Bloomington made prominent by Alfred Kinsey.

Both brothers have prepared statements as coda to this series of radio programs which offer a kind of “last word” on the subject. Those statements made via email to Interchange Producer Doug Storm follow directly below.

More about Ernest Lockridge, his Skeleton Key to the Suicide, his novels, memoirs, and paintings can be found online here: Paintings of Ernest Lockridge.

Larry Lockridge’s refutation of the allegations made by Ernest Lockridge in his book Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father, Ross Lockridge, Jr.

“It wasn’t the lack of evidence, it was the considerable counter-evidence I accumulated during my research for my biography of Ross Lockridge, Jr., Shade of the Raintree, that led me totally to reject my brother Ernest’s theory that childhood sexual abuse of Ross Junior by Ross Senior was the “skeleton key” to the tragedy. I have posted this counter-evidence, some eighteen items, on my brother Ross III’s website, www.raintreecounty.com under “The Biography.” The single piece of counter-evidence people find most convincing concerns an arrangement Ross Junior made with Ross Senior in January of 1947. Ernest was then eight years old and not taking well to the cold weather in Manistee, Michigan where our family was staying. Ross Junior arranged for Ernest to live in Bloomington at his father’s house for four months. The idea was that he would enroll in third grade at Elm Heights elementary school and Ross Senior would teach him recitation. Elsie Lockridge and occasionally Lillian Lockridge would also be in residence, but Ernest and his grandfather would be unsupervised in the large house. If Ross Junior knew that his father had sexually abused himself as a child, would he have put Ernest in such terrible jeopardy? The answer is so emphatically no that this single item is in itself sufficient to discredit Ernest’s entire theory; his key simply doesn’t fit. (With respect to his health, other arrangements could have been made: Ernest could have stayed, as Larry subsequently did, with his mother’s relatives, the Mumbys, within easier walking distance of Elm Heights.)

“I cannot disprove Ernest’s memories of fondling by his grandfather during sleepovers after the suicide of Ross Junior. None of the rest of us encountered such behavior in this grandfather we loved and respected, so these memories are truly shocking. Assuming some truth in them, I suspect Ross Senior’s behavior was yet another bitter consequence of the suicide itself, some totally inappropriate attempt at bonding with the surviving elder grandson by a depressed and guilty person—as parents of suicides usually are. This is an explanation, not an exculpation. It is also a possibility Ernest nowhere considers. It could explain the lack of continuity between Ross Senior’s behavior before the suicide, where I have proved beyond any doubt that there was no sexual abuse, and Ross Senior’s behavior after the suicide as Ernest has described it. Again, the “skeleton key’ Ernest insists on to explaining our father’s suicide doesn’t fit, whatever his own subsequent victimization.”

Larry Lockridge, May 14, 2014, via email to Doug Storm

*********

Ernest Lockridge Responds:

“Larry posits that grief might have caused a decent man, a Doctor Jekyll, to become a sexual monster, a Mister Hyde, and that this might explain Grandpa’s attack on me on the heels of my father’s suicide. By this logic, Bruce’s drowning years earlier might just as well have caused Grandpa to molest Shockley.

“There was no grief or love propelling the indignant, imperious Mister Hyde who attacked me violently. A predator who had invested so much precious time and energy prepping me was claiming his just reward.

“My sainted father would never have abandoned me to a deviant? Last time I looked this is the same father who abandoned his entire family, the lot of us, wife and four kids, without even acknowledging our existence.

“Embedded in SKELETON KEY TO THE SUICIDE OF MY FATHER is the covert culture of pervasive pedophilia, incest, and childhood sexual abuse, cocooned by institutional protection and denial, and permitted to persist, and to wreak unacknowledged havoc in the lives of innocents. Only now are we recognizing the role of denial and naiveté in perpetuating this plague on humanity. We are also just beginning to acknowledge and understand the leading role incestuous pedophilia plays in the tragedy of suicide.

“Larry’s “counter-evidence” counters nothing; rather, it unwittingly re-inscribes the menu of lethal canards that nourish the pedophile. My brother’s entire argument, the rotting foundation of “the biography,” is an epiphany of denial, a tedious mishmash of naiveté and questionable recall that fails to acknowledge the fiendish wiliness and persistence of the pedophile, and how families close ranks to appease and protect him even as he gluts himself at the family trough. “Grandpa would never have done a thing like that”; “Grandma would never have stood for it”; “but he never did anything to me”; “he’s too old, feeble, harmless” (whereas, pedophiles become “harmless” only after the coffin-lid is nailed down); “it’s a one-off thing”; “‘what we had together’ was unique, my being so special and all.”

“Even Custodians of the Family Honor have a minimal responsibility to bring themselves up to date. Rejecting SKELETON KEY rejects what at long last is becoming factually and irrefutably known regarding the domestic pedophile, his victim, and the deplorable propensity of other family-members to do literally anything to make it all just disappear.